Nobody talks about this one. That needs to stop. Mogura no Adventure is a fossil, not just old, but the oldest piece of Japanese TV animation that still exists. You're not watching a show; you're watching the moment someone figured out how to move drawings on television for the first time in Japan. There's no polish, no formula, no safety net of convention because the convention didn't exist yet. It moves like discovery itself. If you care about where anime came from, you don't just watch this as history. You watch it as proof that the impulse to animate, to tell a story frame by frame on a screen, was strong enough that someone did it with the tools they had. Everything that comes after this owes the debt.

A mole named Kuro-chan dozes off in the sunshine and drifts into a dream, where he sets off on a voyage through space. On a faraway planet he meets a group of odd-looking aliens. The story is a lighthearted, humorous adventure told as a single special from 1958, and it is known as the oldest surviving piece of Japanese television animation.